Integrating Social Media Tools

My telecollaborative project was, The World Responds:  Catastrophic Events Around the World.  The goal was to increase global awareness of catastrophes that have/had occurred around the world and its effects on our daily lives and the world.  The activity encouraged and helped students to understand what was at stake in our world today, and to develop interpersonal skills to promote empathy, dialogue, and respect for diverse opinions in order to connect communities, cultures, and classrooms from all over the world.

I think this project would have worked great if I had students use wikis.  The class activity project was designed to allow students in different locations around the world to research, collect, and share information about a major catastrophic event that occurred in their community or country.  Wikis would have proven beneficial since it would have allowed students to contribute news articles, personal narratives of their experiences, poetry, art, photographs, and video to inform and explain to others of these events.  The audience could have also viewed and read how students were taking an active role in solving the problems by enacting community and world responsibilities e.g. make others around the world aware through student fundraisers/projects to support those in need and devastated by the events.  Using wikis would allow students to create documents collaboratively with others, and students from various locations could learn from and respond to these publishing projects.

I think the challenges of using the wikis would be the upkeep or the maintenance of the content since wikis allow users to create and edit interlinked web pages in order to share and create content.  These wiki web pages can be edited, deleted, or created by anyone who visits the site which may pose a problem.  It is very important to remind students to not provide personal information and making sure students are aware of being safe on the internet.  Also, it is important that teachers teach students proper wiki etiquette such as writing in complete sentences and using correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation; no name calling, slang, or cursing; and be brief, stick with the facts, and negotiate and create truth.